Sunday, June 01, 2003

Test Rig

I’m sure you’ll agree - test your web site in as many browsers as you can. How far back you go is another question; Netscape 4 is a particularly tricky browser to support.

But how do you keep a range of browsers to hand so that you can open up your pesky URL and see what others might see? Do you need to maintain a museum of browsers on different platforms? I have a couple of treasured museum pieces (a MAC Classic and a PC486) but I rarely fire them up!

So what do I do? I use Virtual PC.

furthermore...

What you see if you click over the little /t image above is a bit of a screenshot of my MAC running all these browsers: Safari (Mac) Netscape 6 (Mac) Internet Explorer 5 (Mac) Internet Exploer 5.5 (PC) I can also run other Windows browsers but not at the same time! Virtual PC from Connectix gives me the ability to run a virtual Windows PC right on my MAC OS X desktop. On my standard Virtual PC I have Netscape 4, Netscape 6 and Internet Explorer 6 installed. Microsoft make it difficult to test on earlier versions of Internet Explorer for Windows because once you have installed IE6 then it won't let you install earlier versions, detecting that you are already set up with the later! The solution is easy with Virtual PC, because you can set up separate virtual machines and I have another for IE 5.0 and yet another for IE5.5.